Global Health

Global health is a field of expertise that has emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century alongside changing disease profiles, health technologies, and governance structures. This entry provides an overview of the historical conditions that have given rise to the field. It illustrates the new political and financial transformations that have made global health 'global', in contrast to earlier work on international, world, or tropical health. It also charts new undertandings of wellness and disease, which have been shaped by global pandemics including HIV, the increase in non-communicable illnesses, and the recent concern for planetary sustainability. While anthropologists have played a central role in global health since its inception, the fields of anthropology and global health also operate in an 'awkward relation' (Strathern 1987) with one another. In the second part of the entry, we overview how anthropologists work within, against, and in-between the expertise of other global health practitioners. We suggest that insofar as the field of global health is emergent, so too are the ways that anthropologists engage with it. ​